Red squirrel adoptions

Recently I took a moment to celebrate the ubiquitous gray squirrel, but today it’s the turn of the red squirrel—beloved in England, where it has largely been driven out by the bigger and more aggressive gray.

Red squirrel mothers will apparently adopt the orphaned children of other red squirrels. Maybe this behavior helps the whole community survive—or maybe the red squirrels are just too nice to compete with the tough-guy grays?

Here is one of Thoreau’s descriptions of red squirrels, from his Journal.

March 30, 1859
Hear a red squirrel chirrup at me by the hemlocks (running up a hemlock), all for my benefit; not that he is excited by fear, I think, but so full is he of animal spirits that he makes a great ado about the least event. At first he scratches on the bark very rapidly with his hind feet without moving the fore feet. He makes so many queer sounds, and so different from one another, that you would think they came from half a dozen creatures. I hear now two sounds from him of a very distinct character, — a low or base inward, worming, screwing, or brewing, kind of sound (very like that, by the way, which an anxious partridge mother makes) and at the same time a very sharp and shrill bark, and clear, on a very high key, totally distinct from the last, — while his tail is flashing incessantly. You might say that he successfully accomplished the difficult feat of singing and whistling at the same time.